Connection lost to my media roughly every 90 minutes

[munificent]

Hi,

I am not sure whether this is a problem with FreeNAS, the shares I have set up, or my hardware. My issue is that the media player will lose connection to the media stored on the NAS roughly once every 90 minutes. This is a pain as playback will freeze and then revert back to the media player's menu.

This freeze has been tested across three different media playback devices so I know that it is not the player that is at fault.

My hardware is an HP microserver that is on 24/7. It's running 8.2 and has an active jail setup. I have dug around in the web GUI of the server trying to see if there were some kind of automated check that might be causing the connection loss, but I haven't found anything that seems obvious.

I have an older NAS on the same network that runs a Twonkymedia server and that does not have the same problem, so I'm pretty sure this is exclusive to my FreeNAS box.

Does anyone have any bright ideas as to what might be causing this and how I can fix it?

Many thanks.

 

[joeschmuck]

How are you sharing your media, MiniDLNA? Do you have a CRON job established to run every 90 minutes?

 

[munificent]

There are no CRON jobs defined, and I do have serviio running, which is a legacy service I don't use. I've switched it off in case that's the culprit, but since I'm using a Raspberry Pi running Rasbmc to access the media directly from the CIFS shares I have setup, I doubt that's the problem :-/

 

[cyberjock]

I'd try streaming a movie to a desktop or laptop and see if it hangs at 90 mins. If not then the problem is related to the Raspberry Pi. If it does hang then it's something else. I'd try disabling all power saving options first, but it's unlikely these are the problems. I'd also check to see if a hard drive is failing and perhaps run a long SMART test on all of the drives. You may have a network switch that is starting to flake out(I had one that would work fine, but would randomly reset itself.. was a PITA to identify until my desktop stopped during a movie and I looked and saw all of the switch lights on at the same time).

 

[joeschmuck]

You don't have anything else running? Snapshots? what is running in the jail, if anything now? Can you disable the jail? It doesn't sound like the FreeNAS box was hung up or anything. Have you looked at any of the log data to see if something pops out? The best time to do that is directly after a failure.

Good Luck.

 

[munificent]

It's not the Pi, as I have had this with other playback devices. No snapshots being taken. Jail is running Sabnzbd, Couchpotato, Sickbeard, Headphones and Transmission. I don't want to disable the jail as its existence is necessary for media, which is the whole point of a NAS versus an unattended disk array. I have setup a long smart test to run tonight, so I will see if that turns up anything.

Idiot question, but where is the log data accessed from? I will take a look right after the next time I get such an error.

 

[joeschmuck]

If your player is using CIFS to access the media, for testing purposes only I would disable the jail. If I'm missing something then you need to explain in detail why that isn't viable for testing. If it's not viable then I can't help further since I suspect the problem is within the jail but I don't use those applications so I can't troubleshoot them further.

 

[munificent]

I'm sorry for not replying sooner. I have been away. Perhaps this is a stupid question, but if I disable the jail can I re-enable it afterwards without losing data? If not, then the task becomes a lot more complicated as large amounts of data would have to be moved and the setup for these programs is not trivial.

 

[cyberjock]

Yes. The jail is "disabled" on shutdown and then "reenabled" on bootup. It's not a big deal to disable the jail temporarily.